#and the denial other workers trauma and pain from their forms of labor

[baby-yaga]

long post where i talk about how annoying it is being a survivor of sexual abuse lol

not sure how common of a concept this is now but when i was growing up, there seemed to be this concept that sexual assault survivors in particular would be better off if we had died during our attacks. like the process of dealing with our traumas is so awful that we would be better off if we had been killed.

again, not sure how much this is a thought now. sometimes i see survivors in especially low spots saying they wish they had been killed, but i dont think someone suffering to the point of suicidal ideation is the same as, what i perceived to be, a [usa] society-wide agreement that sexual abuse and rape are too awful to ever have a life worth living ever again. i feel incredibly insulted by this now. again, not by other survivors expressing pain, but other people, whove never been through something like this, expressing that their life just wouldnt be worth living if they had been attacked.

this is the only life we can prove we have, and no one goes through it untouched by trauma and pain and death. sure, not everyone experiences sexual trauma, but why should this be any different than any other traumatic event? why should traumatic events period be considered a reason that someones life is no longer worth living? i think its a huge failing of society period that thats even a thought non-survivors could have. that quality of life is believed to be and frequently is so low for survivors of trauma that people who havent been through this would rather die.

you can see this with other forms of trauma too, particularly with physical disability, especially if it was caused by an accident. maybe such a breach of bodily integrity is just too awful for most people to conceive of.

but bodies change all the time. we get older, we get scars, we get rashes and random bruises that we dont know the origin of, we develop new allergies and lose old ones, our eyesight changes with age, as do our other senses, we develop new appreciations for tastes we hated when we were younger, our teeth discolor from coffee or smoking or tea!

part of life is just learning to accept changes as they come. survivors of assault and car accidents can have amazing quality of life--IF THEY ARE GIVEN SUPPORT. denial of support is the thing that makes our lives actually worse long term. i wish that we had what we need. i wish survivors of sexual assault could come forward and receive actual material support, money, stable housing, medical care, mental health care, things that we need to be independent and safe. things that make us safer than being interrogated by police for a crime that was committed AGAINST US! only for the perpetrator to not get charged, receive no jail time [because carceral punishment DOESNT WORK and only exists to exploit labor, not to protect the victims of crimes], and get no therapy or social worker or anything that could potentially keep them from assaulting someone else.

something ive been joking about recently is the worst thing about being a victim of sex trafficking and csam is the labor exploitation. like im a very fortunate broke in that i dont need to pay rent but i also dont think illl ever be able to really be financially stable enough to have my own home, when who-knows-how-much money was made off of my body when i was just a child. as insane as it might sound, i want the money that was made off of me! justice cannot ever be served for what was done to me. what was done cant be fixed, and what was taken is irreplaceable. but i know there was real money exchanged, and it would be a good start.

my honest assumption is that csa is way more common than is reported, because ive spoken to many fellow survivors that never reported what happened to them, including me! i think any of us should be able to walk into a police station and demand infinite money lol

[genderkoolaid]

TBH it's just. very interesting reading the SWERF response to that post because they all seem to be coming from the idea that I think sex work is empowering and awesome. So they clearly did not read my post and just saw that I am against SWERFs and assumed I must think prostitution is the world's greatest career.

Like... yes. Sex work is often done by poor, desperate women with no other choice. The same can be said for dangerous physical labor and poor, desperate men. I agree that sex work is highly entangled with misogyny.

But regardless of the nature of work, if that is their only choice, taking away that choice as an option... isn't going to magically improve their life. If someone literally cannot get any other job but sex work, banning them from sex work isn't going to suddenly open up other options. It's just going to make their life that much harder.

And like I said in the tags, it seems like their ultimate trump card for why sex work bad is "paying for sex makes it coercive and therefore rape!!"

Which, again, how is that any different from physical labor? We literally have the concept of "wage slavery", so this isn't untrodden ground. If I have no other option but to take whatever manual labor job I can, which results in severe damage to my body and drains me emotionally, all because I literally have no other choice to prevent myself from homelessness and starvation... am I really choosing to work? Can I really consent?

And ultimately, I think that's a different question from legality. Whether or not any worker under capitalism can truly consent to their work when the alternative is poverty and death is a more philosophical question. If you go up to an undocumented immigrant who takes whatever job they can and say "you know, you can't actually consent, so this job is really slavery and that's awful! I'm gonna try and make this illegal, to save you!" Their response would probably be that they don't particularly care if they ~can't truly consent~ since making their job illegal would fucking kill them. The vast majority of poor workers don't give a shit about philosophical debates over if consent is possible under capitalism, they care about whether or not they get paid enough money to not die.

Banning sex work isn't going to get rid of it. It's just going to make it harder for sex workers to be protected. Sex worker unions and sex work activists generally push for decriminalization, to allow sex workers full control over their work without the state controlling them. Whether or not you think they can truly consent doesn't matter, what matters is making sure they have full autonomy, that they have the money they need to survive, and that they are able to get help when they need it. Your solution may feel morally better but practically, does it actually help people? Or do you have deeply rooted beliefs about sex and sex work that you refuse to critically analyze?

[chelsourpuss]

http://www.liesjournal.net/volume2.pdf

"There have been countless other opportunities missed in linking sex worker issues with other movements. That prostitutes are not seen as obvious and valuable allies in the anti-trafficking movement or as part of the migrant workers movement is only to the detriment of these movements and their efforts to build in inclusive and sustainable ways. We as prostitutes understand this because many of us come in direct contact with women who have purposely left their countries to come here and work in “houses.” And we hear about and witness the injustices that are done to them, the exploitation they are vulnerable to because as migrant workers and as sex workers, the law does not protect them; because as sex workers they live with the fear of being arrested; because, as with all migrant workers, there is the additional fear of being deported; and because they live with the stigma of prostitution and the isolation that comes along with it. That we cannot hold complexity in the experiences of sex workers prevents us from seeing this different perspective. It prevents us from understanding the many reasons why women would want to come to this country to work as sex workers. It prevents us from understanding how they could then feel exploited when they are asked to work in unreasonable conditions for very little pay. It justifies our paternalistic tendency to want to save “these women.” It prevents us from understanding how our own beliefs about prostitutes make us complicit in these forms of exploitation. In short, it prevents us from seeing immigrant women who trade sex for money as fully human.

When we speak for experiences that are not our own, that we do not fully understand, and when we engage in a rescue-savior mentality towards prostitutes, we assume disempowerment in women and therefore perpetuate violence towards women, however unintentionally. Rather than empower we disempower, we become complicit in violence, we participate in erasure. When we isolate prostitution as problematic relative to other jobs and other forms of sexual contact, we miss an opportunity to understand all forms of wage labor as exploitative and minimize the extent to which all women have been confronted (at one time or another) with the choice to leverage their sexuality in order to gain access to resources. When we enthusiastically support physical safety and labor rights for “all women,” only to the exclusion of prostitutes, we assert that our compassion and their humanity is conditional. There is a tendency to simplify the motivations behind entering the sex industry, insisting upon a strong distinction between people who enter consensually by “choice” and those who are “forced.” While it is true that working in the sex industry is a choice that many women have made for themselves, it is equally one that (like most other economic choices) is largely circumstantial. When we fail to see the complexity behind this choice we run the risk of denying, neglecting and erasing the inequalities many women of color continue to experience after they have made the empowered decision to survive.

Personally, I could never bring myself to buy into the rhetoric of empowerment through normalization that the mostly white middle- class sex worker rights movement was selling. To create a language around and an image of a “Sex Worker” that is normalized and free of stigma did not seem very revolutionary to me. To me it said, “accept us because we are just like you.” Well, what if we’re not like you? What then will you do to us? The campaign to push forward the picture of the fully autonomous and sovereign woman in prostitution contributes to the polarization of ‘The Prostitute’ into two cartoon figures — one of total empowerment and one of total degradation. In reality, women’s experience in the sex industry and their motivations for entering it are vastly complex. This polarization is an oversimplification of both privilege and oppression and of people. There is a disgrace reserved for prostitutes with limited alternatives that women of color know first hand cannot be easily escaped.

Don’t get me wrong, there were many times when I wanted to (and even aspired to) be this image of an independent woman who makes her own income, who is self-respecting and educated. But growing up poor, being Latina, uneducated and a survivor of various traumas, I realized the physical, emotional and psychological barriers that could not be erased by simply claiming a term and believing I had made an empowered decision. The decision to hustle, to take my income into my own hands was empowering but it did not erase the trauma I had endured because of poverty; it did not erase the dysfunctional dynamics around money I had to continue to navigate, nor did it fully alleviate the fear of being financially unstable. Similarly, when I called myself a Sex Worker as opposed to a Prostitute it did nothing to change the fact that men had put their hands on my lips, their mouths on my nipples, their fingers inside of me. It only made this experience invisible and therefore impossible to talk about. The truth is I had done something with my body in order to acquire resources and to not have this acknowledged made me feel as though my body was being disregarded.

In many ways, the term “sex work” presents me with a marketable and homogenized depiction of something that I have never experienced as such. In fact, out of the countless prostitution exchanges I have engaged in, sex work is the last term I would use to describe any handful of them. Today, I use the word prostitute liberally (and interchangeably with sex worker) hoping that when people hear this word they will challenge themselves to see a bigger picture. Sometimes, in conversation, I want the stigma to be there because it is there, because I want real revolution. I want a revolution of true awareness rather than one of denial and elevated status for only some. I want people to acknowledge that there is a stigma in exchanging your sexuality for cash, housing, food, safety, drugs, desires, and resources. I want it to be known that it is not as easy for some to walk away from this stigma. I want it to be clear that the weight of that stigma, oppression and violence in prostitution gets heavier the darker your skin, the less heteronormative you are, the less educated you are and the less value society places on how you are being compensated. I want society to acknowledge a complete picture as complex as a collage of class, race, gender and acts of sex.

Much of the white feminist discourse around prostitution asks us to stop focusing on the sexual nature of sex work and instead consider the labor and human rights implications. There is no doubt that we should be doing this, always considering worker rights, human rights and our humanity within a dominant culture that relentlessly demands that we repress our needs. But considering the sexual nature of prostitution is part of situating it politically and socially. It is part of holding prostitution as a layered endeavor involving many parts, one of which is undeniably sex. Without accepting sex and sexuality within prostitution as something that cannot be pulled apart from race, class, gender, economics, industry and survival, our acceptance of prostitutes is contingent upon the idea that sex will be left out of the equation. But prostitutes are actually having sex and this is what makes people uncomfortable, so to deny this prevents us from acknowledging the full range of experience of women and men in prostitution.

Looking at the sexual nature of prostitution is essential to understanding prostitution. How could it not be? We need to look at it, not in order to scrutinize particular sexual acts that women do in prostitution, but rather to explore the crucial question of why it makes us so uncomfortable. As it turns out, intimacy, sex and sexuality not only one activate some of our deepest fears, but also some of our deepest woundings. The immense silence surrounding the sex industry is symptomatic of our society’s phobia of sexuality, the taboo of women as sexually powerful, a fear of intimacy stemming from violence and trauma, and the circulation of misinformation. Our homophobia, transphobia, femmephobia, erotophobia, and fear of prostitutes ensures that we remain silent, pushing these issues to the bottom so that we cannot resolve them, so that we cannot heal from them. The fear of prostitutes is so loaded because it drags with it the chains of desire, disgust, judgment, morality, guilt and shame. It is loaded with things we are too hurt and too wounded to recognize; we only recognize it as something to fear and therefore something to stay away from. Never does it occur to many of us to take a closer look because there is no hiding from it, because only by taking a look at an impossible bridge can we ever imagine we will cross it. The crime of prostitution is that we would rather not look deeply at our own pain. Prostitution presents us with a reality that is sometimes too emotionally painful to unravel because as we attempt to do so, we begin to realize that it is our reality too. Sex and intimacy are personally also our own struggle. This illuminates our personal and societal shame around sex and our deep internalization of a misogyny-driven capitalist world.

There is something very vile about being a woman in this world. To choose to be a woman, then, is unacceptable. To choose to be a prostitute is unforgivable. We are fearful and violent against women.

We vilify trans women. We crucify prostitutes. And the feminine concept of change and fluidity is under constant attack. In a capitalist world, to be a woman is to be sexually exploited and subordinated, dis- empowered and oppressed, to the benefit of men. The wealthy profit from, and industries are built with, the exploited sexuality and labor (whether sexual or not) of women and the poor. When women do not default into this scripted form of disempowerment, they are in danger of retribution. Any choice a woman makes, any coercion a woman experiences, happens within the context of a world that is violent towards her. Prostitution, then, oftentimes becomes an logical choice in the context of a violent world. That a woman enters prostitution by choice, however, does not erase the oppressive context she must continue to live in, and neither does it make her liable for it. And it certainly does not give any of us a pass to deny, excuse or ignore this as violence. We live in a rape culture that asks women repeatedly to be accountable for their own oppression.

However complex, layered or illusory the decision, I did choose to enter prostitution. What has been oppressive has sometimes been the nature of my work, but most often it has been the social isolation, the lack of emotional support, the violent jokes about sexual assault and murder, as well as the fear of being arrested, attacked, raped or killed, that has felt the most difficult, impactful and traumatizing to navigate. For women of color in prostitution, our very choice to enter prostitution makes us criminals, and our only salvation from this is our victimhood. That we are neither victims in need of rescue or criminals deserving of punishment is never fully held. For many it is hard to accept that women struggling within an industry that is thought of as the most demeaning act for a woman are not necessarily looking to be rescued but are instead in need of resources. Our inability to hold this complexity prevents us from fully accepting women who trade sex for resources. But I am no longer willing to dismember or disembody myself for the sake of salvation. I am not pure and I am still sacred. And I am certainly not available to assimilate into an impossible system in order to be given the liberation that should already belong to me.

Prostitution is loaded with the battle for power and the audacity of fallen women to claim empowerment. Prostitution raises questions about what power is for us, and challenges the faulty equilibrium we’ve created about being empowered in a world designed for our exploitation. Prostitution is the convergence of many forces in our society— the economic hierarchy created by capitalism, the struggle for resources, the sexism stemming from patriarchy, the objectification of women, the impressive ability of women to survive within impossible systems, the ingenuity of people who hustle and make something where there previously was nothing, who reveal entire worlds amidst rubble. Prostitution not only reflects the coming together of all these pieces but it is in actuality a physical manifestation of them.”